Nokia N9 To Be an All-Touchscreen Smartphone That Gives MeeGo Another Chance Discussion

Nokia's next high-end model is going to have a design that eschews virtually all buttons in favor of a 3.9-inch AMOLED display that takes up nearly its entire front. The smartphone will run the MeeGo OS, and include an 8 megapixel camera.

I really kind of don't get it. Sure, it's in the pipeline, so why not? Because putting it out there means support resources, advertising, etc. I'm guessing this piece of hardware might be the first WP7 phone as well. Since you have already bet the farm on WP7, why not take this hardware and do it now, maybe getting it out for the Holiday shopping season at the end of the year?

Like I said once before, Meego fans better jump on this one while they can. And I'm sure this will be a class piece of hardware as well.

Nonetheless, I will be surprised if sales are brisk at all.

Am I showing my age for preferring at least some hardware buttons? I'm not happy that my Imagio doesn't have a hardware button for the camera shutter. I can't believe there isn't at least an on/off button on this device.

According to the Times, which gave this phone a very good write-up, it will be a Meego phone and not WP7. It's main claim to fame is it's entirely designed to facilitate one hand operation. We'll have to wait for a hands-on review to see if that really works out. Apparently, the new CEO of Nokia really pushed to get this out as quickly as possible as a Meego device.

While it seems like a nice piece of hardware, without a 'community' really looking to develop for it, I don't see how it could succeed.

Having a few days, and some time to actually sit still, I thinkk I like what the N9 is proposing. The swipe UI is refreshingly like webOS, but doesn't seem like a copy if it, more like an evolution. You can see where lessons from the N900 were learned and applied, though probably not as far as they could have gone.

The hardware is aged compared to the brisk pace of Android and starting point for some WinPhone devices. But I'm not sure that it's such a bad thing. One of the issues with the N900 was that while it was just about top of the line for it's time, there were several quality issues that shouldn't have happened. I would have liked to see the N8's camera in here. Even if for a moment, making the N9 a halo device, and thereby making a baseline for Nokia's WP experience would have been solid.

Lessons from the software find their way into S40 by next year. That much alone is sweet. Code for the N9 and have apps/services which can hit the meat of the market. Slick trick, and one missed by many. They won't get as many in the Maemo/MeeGo community being pleased with things, but the smart one's have been paying attention and have adjusted (Qt is on Symbian, S40, WebOS, and reportedly RIM's QNX on the Playbook and beyond, that's more than sufficient reach for installed base and creating new markets).

Keyboard version, the N950, seems to be the initial N9-01 that was leaked a few times over the past 18mos or so. Developers can get their hands on it, but I do wonder if it's an exact hardware duplicate (it doesn't have NFC, I'm thinking of RAM). If not, maybe it's the N950 that's the future of S40. That would be MeeGo playing a disruptive role.

The NFC accessories announced alongside the N9 are slick. Especially the speakers. Tap the speakers and your music plays. Tap another speaker and you get left and right channel sound, one channel per speaker. Nifty.

Christian Lindholm speaks of the UI in the N9 as a plateau of the button-task driven UI we are very used to. In a sense, the N9 marking the point in the road where Nokia looks back on it's past with one last swipe to what they did well. From this point forward, it's different.

If your smartphone is so smart, then why are you spending so much time learning it? Shouldn't it learn you and adapt to your leanings?

I like the concept but in practice its not good. Especially in the area of switching among apps.

Among some OS, Android in particular, but also found in others, you got the Return button.

If you are App A, which happens to launch App B from the inside, then your focus shifts to App B with App A in the background. The Return or < button would immediately switch you right back to App A. < button also allows you to cycle between open or most recently opened apps.

In the Meego scheme, given, if you are in App B and you want to go back to App A, you have to swipe to the right, open the tasking screen, then click on App B. Its not as elegant as having the Return < button.

It also appears to me, unlike Android, apps are not self closing, so you have to be consciously quitting or closing apps. No widgets either. Widgets have proven to me that you can increase your engagement with the device --- I tend to catch more information, open more apps that I have installed widgets because they bring the information directly to you without opening the apps. Widgets often cause you to open the app. Then there is the question if the N9 has a universal search at all, that is, capable of searching everything from your phone contacts to all your apps and the web in one single input line, which is either opened in a widget or button.

IMO, any UI requires a visual anchor. An anchor is something that remains constant screen to screen, representing either the most commonly used features or commands. The anchor can be within the screen like a set of menus, or outside of the screen, like a set of buttons. They are always gives some assurance to the user

Given these in mind, I am not sure and I don't imagine that Meego Harmattan gives a smooth workflow. The Harmattan UI is still a nice and elegant concept though.

Would it matter now? Probably not. The tech heads responsible for Meego in Nokia appears to have left and those that remain might appear redundant or looking to leave. The developer interest is very small. I don't know where Nokia gets this illusion there are an army of developers waiting for QT to happen but everything I hear with developers show their main focus is on iOS and Android by an overwhelming majority.

I got the impression from several write-ups and posts that apps in Android don't close unless specifically closed. Some threads talk about 3rd party apps to close apps and such. I don't know myself; but it would be nice to know how it actually works.

Android apps self close, but very few Android apps actually come with a quit button. So you just leave one running app to start another, and eventually the one in the background closes after a period of dormancy if you don't switch back to it again or if that app isn't doing anything like downloading or streaming.

Task managers are for people who are impatient and just wants to kill everything to clear up memory. But it does more harm than good, since Android apps even when not running, produce background agents to handle things like poll or push notifications and widgets, and task killers misidentify them as apps and also kill them.

If there are many apps in the background and the system is running out of RAM, Android takes the least used apps and kills them automatically to clear memory. But the OS knows which are idle apps and what are agents aka services, than the user with his task killer. So its better to let the OS be.